Pete’s was there. So were those of most of his buddies. “Misery loves company,” he said, and he wasn’t joking. He had a day to boil everything he’d picked up in Peking into a duffel’s worth of stuff. Some of the residue he could mail back to his folks: jade and enamelwork and the like. The rest…He set it out for the Marines who were staying behind. “Take whatever you want and pitch the rest,” he told them. He wasn’t the only guy saying that, either—not even close. Somebody who stayed in Peking would hit the jackpot with what other Marines thought was junk. Whether he’d get the chance to enjoy it might be a different question.
Japanese and Chinese stared at the leathernecks marching through the city. Some of the Chinamen pointed and exclaimed. The Japs showed better discipline. “Eyes—front!” Sergeant Larry Koenig bawled. McGill’s head went to the front. He kept looking around, though. Koenig wouldn’t catch him at it—and he didn’t.
The train flew American flags and had the Stars and Stripes painted on, and on top of, every car. No one wanted another incident like the gunboat Panay’s misfortune. Pete knew damn well he didn’t. He climbed onto the train. His corporal’s stripes assured him of a seat. The whistle screeched. The train started to roll. In a day or so…Shanghai. Well, it’ll be different, anyhow, Pete thought, and lit up an Old Gold.
HIDEKI FUJITA WOULD HAVE LIKED to see better weather before Japan unleashed its attack along the Ussuri. Other sergeants who’d been stationed along this stretch of the border between Manchukuo and the Soviet Union longer than he had laughed at him for saying so. He would have bet even privates who’d been stationed here a while laughed at him. They knew better than to do it where he could catch them, though. He would have made them sorry. He couldn’t thump other sergeants. As long as he didn’t do anything permanent, he could knock privates around as he pleased.
The hell of it was, the laughing sergeants and even the laughing privates might be right. This was the kind of place that had about twenty minutes of summer every year, with a half hour of spring to warn you it was coming and another half hour of fall to warn you it was going. If the army waited for perfect weather in which to strike, it might still be waiting in 1943.
This weather was a lot of things. Perfect it wasn’t, not unless you were a polar bear. One blizzard after another howled down from Siberia. The swirling snow did let the Japanese hide the men and matériel they brought forward for the attack. Of course, it also made bringing troops and guns and munitions forward that much harder. But if you complained about every little thing…
Sergeant Fujita did wonder whether the horrible weather also let the Russians bring up reinforcements and guns. When he mentioned that to Lieutenant Hanafusa, the platoon commander indulged in what seemed to be everybody’s favorite sport: he laughed at Fujita. “Not likely, Sergeant!” Hanafusa said. “The Russians are too busy fighting the Poles and the Germans to even worry about us.”
“Yes, sir,” Fujita said woodenly, and dropped the subject like a live grenade. He wasn’t an educated man or anything. He couldn’t hold his own in an argument against somebody who was. But he knew his own country was up to its armpits in China. That didn’t keep anybody from starting this new adventure. Russia was bigger than Japan, a hell of a lot bigger. Why shouldn’t it also be able to pat its head and rub its stomach at the same time?
After a while, snow started melting faster than it fell. More and more bare ground appeared; white no longer cloaked the pines and firs and spruces on both sides of the Ussuri. Here and there, flowers started blooming. They sprouted with what struck Fujita as frantic haste, as if they knew they wouldn’t have long to do whatever they did. He wouldn’t have called this spring in Japan, but it looked to be as much as the Ussuri country had to offer.
Lieutenant Hanafusa seemed delighted. “Spring comes early this year!” he exclaimed. “Even the weather kami are on our side.”
No one told him he was wrong. Fujita only hoped the spirits in charge of the weather knew what they were doing. No, not only. He hoped the people in charge of the Kwantung Army knew what they were doing, too.
Whenever he got the chance, he peered across the Ussuri with field glasses. He rarely glimpsed Russians. Whatever the Red Army had over there, it was concealed. The Japanese would find out when they crossed the river—no sooner.
He kept hoping the people in charge of things would change their minds. Hope was cheap—no, free. And one of the big reasons it was free was that it was so unreliable. Men and guns kept right on moving up toward the Ussuri. Fujita presumed planes did, too, but the airstrips were farther back, so he didn’t see them.
Superior Private Shinjiro Hayashi said, “Please excuse me, Sergeant-san, but do our superiors believe the Russians don’t know we’re preparing an attack?” His education didn’t keep him from seeing what also looked all too obvious to Fujita.
“If you think our superiors tell me what they believe, Hayashi, you’re dumber than I give you credit for, and that isn’t easy,” Fujita snapped. He quashed the university student without showing how worried he was himself. He hoped he didn’t show it, anyhow. If Hayashi had suspicions, he also had the common sense to keep quiet about them.
The Japanese got a start hour—0530 on 1 April 1939. The last couple of days dragged along. Everybody got ready and did his best to make sure the Red Army went on thinking everything was normal…if that was what the Red Army thought.
“When we detach Vladivostok from the Communists, the Emperor will be proud of us,” Lieutenant Hanafusa told his platoon as they waited for the barrage to begin. Sergeant Fujita imagined marching into Vladivostok. He imagined the Emperor pinning a medal on him with his own divine hand. He imagined his heart bursting in his chest from pride.
The shelling opened right on time. The noise was titanic. The Kwantung Army was firing everything it had, and firing as fast as it could—so it seemed to Fujita, anyhow.
Hanafusa’s whistle shrilled. “Let’s go!” he said. They raced out of the dugouts and ran for the boats waiting on the river. As soon as they got in, got over, and got out, they could start fighting a more ordinary kind of war.
Russian shells were already dropping on the Japanese side of the Ussuri. The barrage hadn’t stunned all the Reds, then. Too bad, even if Fujita hadn’t really believed it would. The Russians were just too good at covering up and digging in. Well, no help for it. He jumped into his assigned boat. The whole squad made it in. He cut the rope that tied the boat to the riverbank. “Come on!” he yelled, and started paddling like a man possessed. The rest of the soldiers paddled with him.
He didn’t want to go into the river. With the heavy pack on his back, he’d sink like a stone. And the water that splashed up onto him said it was bitterly cold even now. Russian machine guns on the far bank yammered out death. Tracers snarled past the boat. Bullets kicked up rows of splashes in the stream. One holed the boat, miraculously without hitting anybody. Water jetted in.
“Stuff something into that!” Fujita shouted to the closest soldier. The man did. Fujita didn’t see what. He didn’t care. As long as the leak slowed, nobody would.
Mud grated under the boat’s keel. The Japanese soldiers jumped out. They ran toward the closest machine-gun nest. The sooner they knocked out those deadly toys, the longer they were likely to live. One of them exploded into red mist fifty meters from the enemy strongpoint. “Mines!” everybody else yelled. Fujita wanted to run very fast and to stand very still, both at the same time. He might have guessed the Russians would use mines to protect their positions, but he didn’t have to like it.
A couple of more men went down before the Japanese chucked grenades into the dugout through the firing slit. Even that didn’t do for all the Russians. One fellow staggered out all bloody, his uniform shredded. He raised his hands over his head. “Tovarishchi!” he choked out. Fujita had heard that in Mongolia. Comrades!, it meant.
He shot the Russian in the face. “You can’t shoot at us and then quit, bastard,” he said. From everythin
g he’d heard, machine gunners everywhere had a hard time giving up. And he might even have done the Russian a favor. He was inclined to think so. What greater disgrace than surrender was there?
Japanese soldiers stormed into the woods. They soon discovered their artillery hadn’t done everything it might have. The Russians had more machine guns farther back from the Ussuri. They had snipers in camouflage smocks high up in the trees. They’d hidden more mines to slow and to channel the Japanese advance. And they had riflemen waiting in rear-facing foxholes invisible from the front, men who stayed quiet till the Japanese went by and then shot them in the back. Those fellows had as much trouble surrendering as machine gunners did.
Airplanes dueled overhead. In among the trees, Fujita couldn’t see how the aerial combat went. When bombs fell on the Red Army positions ahead, he felt like cheering. When explosions came too close to his own men, he swore. He thought the Russians were taking more punishment than they were giving out, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was just rooting for his own team.
Halfway through that mad afternoon, a runner told him, “You’re in command of the platoon.”
“Huh?” he said. “What happened to Lieutenant Hanafusa?”
“He caught two in the chest,” the other soldier answered. “Maybe he’ll make it, but…” A shrug said the odds were bad.
Fujita sure wouldn’t have wanted to catch two in the chest, or even one in the toe. But if the platoon was his—at least till another officer showed up—he had to do his best with it. They were still at least a kilometer from the day’s planned stop line. He needed to find out what was up with the other squads, too. “Forward!” he called. That was never wrong.
“M.oscow speaking,” the radio announced. It was 060 0. Sergei Yaroslavsky drank a glass of sugared tea, hot from the samovar. Pilots and navigators jammed the ready room at the Byelorussian airstrip. A Stuka could have taken out the whole squadron with a well-aimed bomb. The Nazis were sleeping late—or later, anyhow. The Soviet flyers hungered for news, not least because it might tell them what they would be doing next.
Smoke from almost as many papirosi as there were Red Air Force officers in the ready room blued the air. Somebody got up and made the radio louder. When he sat down, someone else patted him on the back, as if to say Good job! Yes, they were all jumpy this early morning.
“Comrades! Soviet citizens! Our motherland has been invaded!” the news reader said solemnly. “Without provocation, without warning, the Empire of Japan has launched a multipronged attack against the Siberian districts of the Russian Federated Soviet Socialist Republic of the peace-loving USSR. Severe fighting is reported in several areas. All drives against the Trans-Siberian Railroad have already been blunted or soon will be—so Red Army commanders in the field have assured General Secretary Stalin. Under his leadership, victory of the Soviet workers and peasants is assured.”
Sergei nodded. So did almost everybody else in the ready room. Some officers, he was sure, had no doubts that what was coming out of the radio was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. And if you did have doubts, looking as if you didn’t was even more important. People couldn’t suspect what they didn’t see.
The announcer went on and on about towns bombed from the air, atrocities on the ground, and numbers of Japanese soldiers killed. Except for civilians, he said not a word about Soviet casualties. There must have been some; chances were they were heavy. Sergei was sure he wasn’t the only one to notice the omission. Notice or not, the Red Air Force officers went right on nodding.
“Foreign Commissar Litvinov has pledged that this war against the Japanese will have a result different from that of the Tsar’s corrupt regime in 1905,” the newsreader finished. Sergei cheered and clapped his hands. So did everyone else. Nobody could be proud of Russia’s performance in the Russo-Japanese War.
After a pause, the announcer talked about fighting in the Soviet west. “The rasputitsa has made movement difficult for both sides,” he admitted. That wasn’t the smallest understatement Sergei had ever heard. Eastern Poland and western Byelorussia were somewhere between swamp and bog. The Germans still occasionally flew off paved runways. The Red Air Force was grounded.
“In western Europe, the fighting in France has reached what the Germans call a decisive phase,” the fellow went on. “The French government denies German claims that there is fighting inside the Paris city limits. The French and English admit heavy fighting continues east and northeast and even north of the French capital. They state they still hope to halt and eventually repel the latest German thrust, however.”
He spoke with an air of prissy disapproval, like an important man’s plump wife talking about the facts of life. As far as the USSR was concerned, the imperialists were hardly better than the Fascists. But the Soviet Union and England and France had the same enemies at the moment. Expedience could trump ideology.
And, sure enough, the newsreader sounded a little warmer when he said, “British and French bombing of German territory seems to be picking up—judging, at least, by the outraged bleats emanating from Hen Goebbels. If one listens to the Germans, their opponents take care to bomb only schoolhouses, orphanages, and hospitals.”
Sergei chuckled. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Yes, German propaganda was pretty ham-fisted. But wasn’t what poured out of Soviet radios just as clumsy?
That was something a good Soviet citizen wasn’t supposed to notice. After all, didn’t Pravda mean Truth? Maybe only someone who was serving in the military—maybe only someone serving in the military who’d spent some time in a foreign country—would notice the discrepancies. Once you spotted a few lies, though, you started wondering what else you heard was malarkey.
Across the table, Anastas Mouradian sat there smoking papirosi one after another. Did irony fill his liquid black eyes, or was that only Sergei’s imagination? Anastas was going to get in trouble one of these days. Anybody who looked ironic in the middle of the morning news was bound to get noticed. The only surprise was, it had already taken this long.
When the announcer shifted to increased production and overfulfillment of the Five-Year Plan’s norms, the officers started to relax. This was only fluff; they’d already got the meat from the news. If you were careful, you could smile about this stuff without risking too much.
At last, music replaced the news. “Two fronts,” remarked the flyer from Siberia, the guy who came from a thousand kilometers north of Irkutsk and laughed at the cold weather here. Quickly, Bogdan Koroteyev added, “It’s not what we wanted, of course, but it’s what we’ve got.”
“We’ll win anyhow,” Anastas Mouradian said. Sergei nodded vigorously. He grinned at his crewmate. That was how you were supposed to talk! He had his doubts whether Anastas meant it, but what did that have to do with anything? The picture you showed the outside world was more important (to your survival, anyhow) than whatever you carried deep inside your heart.
“You’d better believe we will,” Lieutenant Colonel Borisov boomed. “We can whip the little yellow monkeys with one hand tied behind our back, and as soon as things are dry here we’ll show the Nazis and Poles what we can do.”
No one argued with the squadron commander. For one thing, he was the squadron commander. For another, what he said was bound to be the Party line. Russia hadn’t beaten the Japanese the last time around, but it was easy to blame that on Tsarist corruption, as the radio announcer had. The Red Army had performed well in recent border clashes.
Well, it had if you believed the news. Sergei wished he hadn’t started wondering about what he heard on the radio and read in the papers. It made him wonder about everything. Oh, well. What could you do? Doubting the official stories might give you a better notion of what was really going on. What was the phrase in the Bible? You saw through a glass, darkly—that was it. In the USSR, that was likely to be your closest approach to truth.
No enemy planes came overhead. If German or Polish bombers had taken off from paved runways,
they were harassing other Soviet fields. And the SB-2s here couldn’t fly even if the pilots wanted to. As with the winter blizzards, the flyers had nothing to do but sit around and wait.
Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka. It was early to start drinking. Sergei thought so, anyhow. By the way Bogdan Koroteyev tilted back the bottle, he started at this heathen hour all the time—or maybe he hadn’t stopped from the night before. Sergei took a swig, too, when the bottle came his way. Why not? You didn’t want to look like a wet blanket or anything.
NEWSBOYS HAWKED THE VÖLKISCHER BEOBACHTER on every street corner in Berlin. “Decisive battle in France!” they yelled. DECISIVE BATTLE IN FRANCE! the newspaper headline shouted in what had to be 144-point type. The photo under the headline showed three Wehrmacht men, rifles in hand, leaping over some obstacle in unison. Except for the weapons and helmets, they might have been Olympic hurdlers. NOTHING CAN STOP OUR INFANTRY! the subhead boasted.
“Paper, lady?” asked a towheaded kid of about fourteen. If the war lasted long enough, he’d put on the same uniform the soldiers on the front page were wearing.
See how you like it then, you little son of a bitch, Peggy Druce thought. Aloud, all she said was, “Nein, danke.” In another block or two, she knew she’d have to do it again.
Boys, old men, women…The only men of military age were cops, soldiers and sailors on leave, and middle-aged fellows who’d been too badly wounded in the last war to have to wear the uniform this time around. She supposed some farmers and doctors and factory workers were also exempt, but she didn’t see them. Whatever jobs they had, they were busy doing them.
Another newsboy cried a different headline: “Soviet Russia now encircled in a ring of steel!” Several people stopped to pay a few pfennigs for his paper. The Germans like that idea. When they thought about it, they didn’t have to think that the Reich was fighting a two-front war.
Peggy wouldn’t have called a half-assed fight over here and what might be a bigger, more serious one way the hell over there a ring of steel. A ring with gaps so big would fall off your finger pretty damn quick. But the Goebbels school of newspaper writing had perpetrated far worse atrocities. Even a Hearst headline man might have come up with this one.
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